ANALYSIS OF RING-STIFFENED CYLINDRICAL-SHELLS

A new analytical and numerical method is presented for modeling and an alysis of cylindrical shells stiffened by circumferential rings. This method treats the shell and ring stiffeners as individual structural c omponents, and considers the ring eccentricity with respect to the she ll middle surface. Through use of the distributed transfer functions o f the structural components, various static and dynamic problems of st iffened shells are systematically formulated With this transfer functi on formulation, the static and dynamic response, natural frequencies a nd mode shapes, and buckling loads of general stiffened cylindrical sh ells under arbitrary external excitations and boundary conditions can be determined in exact and closed form. The proposed method is illustr ated on a Donnell-Mushtari shell, and compared with finite element met hod and two other modeling techniques.